Hopefully by now you are finished (or almost finished) with your analysis of a formal and an informal assessment. Reflect on your work to identify (and describe) at least three strategies that you use (or try) in your own classroom to learn from formal assessments and have your students learn from formal assessments.
The formal assessment that I chose to use for this analysis wasn't great it also had quite a lot of potential. It needs to be beefed up in terms of really getting some form of comprehension out of the students rather then just recall but I believe that by doing reflective analysis of our work helps us to realize mistakes we make and ways to better everything we use for teaching not just assessments.
The first method of formal assessment I have used in my classroom is in my 11/12th grade anatomy class. In this class I have the students take short quizzes every week or so. This helps me to see if the ways I am presenting the material is working and also to see if the students are reading and looking over the notes. This method helps the students because it keeps them in tune with whats going on by having them re-read their notes and study and prevents a lot of material building up to scare them. The class has tons of material and to have to study it all at once would be quite overwhelming this forces them to study a small amount at a time.
The second form of formal assessment took place in my 8th grade middle school class and that was writing conclusions for a lab that the students performed. It not only allowed me to see what the students got from the lab but I could use this to fill in holes or fix misconceptions. It helped the students by making them form opinions and come up with their own way of explaining what they saw.
The third type of formal assessment I have used which I found to be interesting was also in the 8th grade class and it was having the students come up with aliens from each planets and presenting them to the class. The students researched the planet they chose and then came up with an alien that could live there. They then presented this to the class. I could use this time to add to the students presentation to help give the students more information. The students gained so much from this, they gained research skills, writing skills, and were able to be creative.
The formal assessment that I chose to use for this analysis wasn't great it also had quite a lot of potential. It needs to be beefed up in terms of really getting some form of comprehension out of the students rather then just recall but I believe that by doing reflective analysis of our work helps us to realize mistakes we make and ways to better everything we use for teaching not just assessments.